"All is number." Pythagoras of Samos (570 - 480 B.C.) Biography

Pythagoras is said to have travelled to Egypt and babylon when he was young in order to learn somethingabout higher mathematics. Lateron he and also his folowers left Samos because of political difficulties and the tyranny of Polikrates (see Schiller's Ballad "Der Ring des Polykrates") and founded a sort of order in South Italy, whose members had to follow strict rules of cleanness, self-discipline and eating. Pythagoras can also be seen as a political reformer; the "associations" established by his pupils partly had great political influence, and for that reason they were sometimes even persecuted. This order also admitted women as members, where they had a highly respected position. The rules of this order were supposed to preserve the soul's purity as the Pythagoreans believed in reincarnation, they believed in the possibility of ending the cycle of rebirth and to achieve the final release of the soul from the body (the body was seen as the prison of the soul).

In order to get release the members of the order studied five years while stricly maintaining silence; their main subjects were mathematics, music, gymnastics and medicine. Today it cannot be decided clearly, whether this rules had been imposed by Pythagoras himself or his pupils, at least the famous "sentence of Pythagoras" has not been discovered by Pythagoras first, it had been known to the Chinese and the babylonians before. The babylonian astronomers had found out, that the movement of celestial bodies can be arithmetically recorded, calculated and consequently even predicted. The babylonian studies of astronomy must have given Pythagoras deep impressions of the power of numbers in nature.